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Home » How To Leave Behind A Meaningful Inheritance: Nancy Sharp (Transcript) 

How To Leave Behind A Meaningful Inheritance: Nancy Sharp (Transcript) 

Here is the full transcript of Life Letters coach Nancy Sharp’s talk titled “How To Leave Behind A Meaningful Inheritance” at TEDxCherry conference.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

The Importance of Sharing Life Experiences

Is there someone or something in your life that has great meaning to you? Raise your hand. Excellent. That’s what I thought. Remember, anything that has special significance in your life is worth sharing.

My friend Bill called me a year ago last April. He called because he was so excited about writing his life letter. Bill is a physician with no children. He was finally getting the chance to share some of the family history and the life experiences that, quite frankly, he’d been running from most of his life. The very next day after Bill called me, he got into a freak accident playing pickleball, and he broke his neck.

I went to go visit Bill in the neurosurgical intensive care unit a couple days later to help him finish what he had set out to do, to write his life letter. Two days later, it was a Thursday night, Bill called me. He left me a voicemail, and he said, “Nancy, I’m having surgery tomorrow morning. I don’t know whether I’m going to make it through the surgery or not, but I just want to say thank you because I said it all.”

Life’s Fragility and Personal Experiences

Well, Bill made it through the surgery. He lost use of all of his limbs with the injury, and he spent many months at Craig Hospital doing intense rehabilitation. This is where this picture was taken. Fortunately, Bill has shown some improvement, but he’s got a long and a tough road ahead of him.

Life is so fragile. It is so, so fragile. And I know how fragile life is because this is my story too. My first husband, Brett, died of a brain tumor when our twins, Rebecca and Casey, were just 2 1⁄2 years old. This is among the last pictures we ever took as a family at Calvary Hospice in Bronx, New York.

Brett died just a couple weeks later. This was a terrible time in my life, as you might imagine. And when at last Brett died, I have to say that his death was both anguishing and also merciful.

Moving Forward and the Power of Words

After a few tough years of soul-searching and mourning, I decided to leave my New York City life and head west to Denver, Colorado, to start again. If anybody had ever suggested to Brett or to me that he write a life letter so that someday our children would have a sense of who he was and what really mattered most to him, those words would have carried the kids through so many years. Those words would have been such an enduring gift, the most enduring gift imaginable. Those words would have been like gold.

This is a picture of my twins pretty recently, and they’re now 22 years old. So what’s a life letter? A life letter is a written expression of what matters most that can be shared with loved ones today and over time as well as one’s community. Your family history, your precious memories, your values that are most important to you and your wishes.

The life letter is inspired by the ancient practice of ethical wills and legacy letters. This is a 3,500-year-old tradition that began with fathers passing on wisdom to their sons to carry into the next generation. In the Middle Ages, this became a written form, and there are many powerful examples of ethical wills and legacy letters written over the centuries. The life letter can be two pages.

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The Life Letter: A Reflection of What Matters Most

It can be ten pages. It can even be a little bit more. It can be handwritten. It can be typed. It can be spoken. It is not, however, meant to be your entire life story. It’s not your autobiography. It is a much more distilled reflection of what really matters most to you. It can also be used as a way to clarify legal estate documents.

Think of the will or a trust as everything you want your loved ones to have, whereas a life letter is about everything you want them to know. And there’s another difference, too. A will is shared after a death.

Sharing Your Story and Building Self-Acceptance

Ideally, the life letter should be shared during one’s lifetime. So many of us wish we knew more about the people who came before us, just like my children. When you share your treasured stories, your wishes for the future, your history, you’re making it possible so that someday a grandchild or a great-grandchild or someone from your community, your church, your synagogue, your mosque, your bird-watching group has answers to questions about your life because your life matters.

Your story matters. And when we get to reflect on our lives in this sort of holistic, nuanced way, it builds self-acceptance, even a sense of self-mastery, and that lets you live with much greater clarity and purpose today. This is exactly what one of my students discovered when she wrote her life letter.

She’s a mother, a grandmother, and pastor of a very large congregation. But what surprised her most of all when she wrote her life letter was just what an incredible gift it was to herself. There are many benefits to writing life letters.

The Importance of Relationships and Sharing

In a landmark study led by Dennis Jaffe about the resilience of 100-year-old families, these are very multigenerational families, the research found that successful families who stayed together during good times and hard times, those families cared a lot less about the material wealth and the tangible assets that was passed on from generation to generation than they did about the quality of their relationships.

What they valued far more than material wealth was the kinds of connections and sharing and growth and learning that took place, and that is exactly what a life letter can do.